The Doomsday Click

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by subscribing now.

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about computer viruses… Writer describes finding a computer virus, featuring Anna Kournikova, in an e-mail from his wife… Because my family and I live in Europe, where this particularly hardy virus began to spread, and my wife’s office computer is connected permanently to the Internet, she became a sort of digital Typhoid Mary. She unwittingly took out an entire cluster of computers at the Harvard Medical School, incapacitated laptops owned by the New York Times, and caused damage and confusion at film companies, publishing houses, and magazines, as well as among hundreds of acquaintances… American intelligence officials recently were startled to learn that hackers had broken into the Sandia National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and copied highly classified information from computers there. In the aftermath of the spy-plane collision over the South China Sea, Chinese hackers struck fiercely at American Web sites… Before a truce was declared, early in May, this particular cyberwar had escalated considerably, with hundreds of Web defacements, including some at the White House, the F.B.I., and NASA… . Not long ago, however, I decided to see for myself what it would take to cause harm on the Internet: to release a virus, crash a computer system, obliterate privacy, and destroy the data that we have come to rely on. I began slowly, by collecting viruses, worms, bugs, and other purely malicious pieces of software as if they were rare butterflies. (The definitions of these creatures vary, but a worm is a tiny program that can copy itself. A virus, although equally damaging, simply infects other programs.) I have two giant hard drives on my computer, and within weeks I had turned one of them into a laboratory for the most dangerous viruses on the Internet: the Melissa virus, Happy99.exe, the Love Bug, among others, are floating around cyberspace, and I have copies of all of them, carefully tucked away on disks, like tarantulas suspended in aspic, or the last archival strains of smallpox. There are dozens of scanner programs on the Internet, which make it possible to stalk the Web for hidden weaknesses. They offer the digital equivalent of sneaking from house to house trying doorknobs to see if the doors are locked. And, if you know what you are doing, you can sit in Rome (or Baghdad, for that matter) and check a few hundred thousand American doorknobs an hour. Writer interviews computer scientist Peter G. Neumann, 68… Writer visits Amsterdam to meet the person who made the Kournikova virus… It turns out that the young man, whose sign-on was ONTHEFLY but whose name is protected under Dutch privacy laws, was a “skriptkiddy,” somebody who makes a virus by following a recipe from a kit. Skriptkiddies are all over the Internet, and there is an astounding variety of tools like the one used to create the Kournikova virus; in my collection, for instance, I have the Mass Destruction Library, the China Town Macro Word Virus, the Spamicidal Trojan Batch Creator, and Nuke’s Randomic Life Generator, among others…. Writer describes breaking into various sites at an Amsterdam internet café with young Dutch hackers, using programs such as LophtCrack and Nutcracker… LophtCrack was written by a crew of “white hat” hackers, with roots at M.I.T., who called themselves Lopht Heavy Industries. The Lopht people astonished Capitol Hill a couple of years ago by stating at a hearing that it would be dangerous to use the Internet for any vital service like air-traffic control. They also claimed that they could bring down the whole network in less than an hour. Nobody seemed to doubt them. Writer tells about using a kit to manufacture a virus he called “newyorker.com” which he mailed to himself and which he absently opened later, only to erase his hard drive…

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.